Dean Martin is crooning from the loud speakers. A couple is holding hands, lingering over a late-afternoon drink under a big red parasol. A dad and his daughter have stopped for a rest on their way home from school. In the vegetable gardens nearby, sunflowers, already six feet tall, tower over kale, herbs and lettuce.

All this has come to life in what was, until a couple of months ago, one of the dreariest spots in all of downtown Montreal: Place Émilie-Gamelin. The concrete and grass quadrant bounded by de Maisonneuve Blvd. and Ste-Catherine St. to the north and south and St-Hubert and Berri Sts. to the east and west, was created as a park to mark the city’s 350th birthday. But it has never amounted to much more than a hangout for homeless people and drug dealers. It has been the meeting point for student protests, but most Montrealers hurry through, or avoid it altogether.

Until now that is. This spring, Place Émilie-Gamelin was transformed into Les Jardins Gamelin, as the big lit-up sign at the gardens’ entrance announces. It’s a pilot project undertaken by the Quartier des spectacles Partnership, Pépinière & Co., a non-profit urban design group, and Sentier Urbain, an urban agriculture collective.

They closed the park down for a month this spring and built raised garden beds, then planted them with dozens of varieties of edible flowers, herbs and vegetables. A shipping container painted fire-engine red was brought in to house a bar and café that is open from 7:30 in the morning until 11 at night, serving house-made sodas, sandwiches and salads — and beer, wine and cocktails on the weekend. What used to be a windblown expanse of concrete slabs is now lined with long wooden tables shaded by parasols festooned with party lights. Overhead, a massive, amorphous suspended sculpture by the American artist Janet Echelman made of fishing nets and wire casts a magical shadow over the space, like a flying jellyfish. And with that Place Émilie-Gamelin has been reborn as concert venue, public garden and outdoor café.

It’s a bit of a social experiment, Pascale Daigle, the woman in charge of programming for the Quartier des spectacles Partnership, confesses. When her non-profit organization took the park under its wing in 2012, it began hosting shows there. Trying to inject a little whimsy, it installed a giant sidewalk chess board. But still, Place Émilie-Gamelin couldn’t shake its rough edges or its bad reputation. City planners were at a loss as to how to enliven the spot. Daigle says it became clear that the only way to change the park was to occupy it, not with impressive architecture or glitzy shows, but with activities for a wide mix of people.

“We are not chasing anyone away. What we are trying to do instead is to bring other people in to create a new mix.”

With the gardeners and their volunteers working in the vegetable beds and the staff at The Comptoir café on duty, there is a constant presence that has deterred criminals from doing business here. The bicycle police who wander in and out help, too. And corny as it may sound, Daigle says even the jazzy music and the party lights have set a new mood.

“We wanted people to feel safe here. We wanted to create an ambience that would welcome them, and a kind of bustle that would make them want to stay,” she said, standing in the gardens on a Monday afternoon. “Really, we have been flabbergasted at how positively people have responded. These are people who said they would never before have brought their children here. And now they have re-appropriated the space.”

Margaret Mitchell, for example, has just set down her bags on one of the tables and is listening to the music and soaking up a few rays of late-day sunshine. She’s a senior citizen who lives near Ontario St. and Papineau Ave. and has often walked briskly past the park on her way out of the nearby Berri métro station.

“Before, I would never have dared sit here. This was territory belonging to beggars and drug dealers, ” she said. “But here I am, surrounded by nature. I can smell the mint and the herbs.”

The neighbourhood has by no means been miraculously transformed. There are still deals going on along the periphery of Jardins Gamelin. A tussle has just broken out between two very drunk men, and another is passed out on one of the benches built of recycled palettes. But Daigle says there is much less trouble going down now that the park is populated by all kinds of people.

To come up with the concept for Les Jardins Gamelin, Jérôme Glad of Pépinière & Co., says he borrowed from public spaces in Europe, which often serve more than one function. He looked for inspiration to German biergartens — not as drinking establishments but as lively public places for people to gather and talk and dance and enjoy summer.

The whole place has a decidedly rustic feel, with its recycled pallets, bare-wood arbours and twig trellises. It’s meant to feel “accessible” to those without much understanding of public art or architecture. The pallets, Glad said, can be moved around. Stacked vertically, they look like urban totems. But piled two or three high they also make a great impromptu stage or a chaise longue for lying down and taking a nap.

A spot for a snack at Place Émilie-Gamelin.

“Place-making” is what Glad and his Pépinière & Co. colleagues do. They give new energy to neglected urban spaces. To create a “place” out of space, there needs to be lots of life and plenty to do, says the young urbanist. That’s why he and the project’s other developers planned dance lessons, lunchtime concerts, fitness breaks and DJ Sundays for Les Jardins Gamelin. The important thing, Glad said, is that the gardens be part of the neighbourhood and that there be many different community partners involved in its success.

The space has been broken down into intimate pockets, with wood pallets stacked architecturally.

The first order of business, he said, was to break down the space into more intimate pockets: garden beds with paths winding through them, a terrasse with tables and chairs, a place to dance. The designers chose wood to bring life to the cold feel of concrete and cement, and they added party lights and big lit-up signs that scream “fun.”

“All that was here before was a giant slab of concrete,” he said. It was cold and foreboding. It seemed intimidating to people to cross from one side to the other,” he said.

Activities for all, advertised on a blackboard.

Next came the job of animating the place. So they set about organizing a multitude of activities for daytime and nighttime use. There are concerts and circus performances, but also free yoga classes and swing and salsa lessons and board-games evenings, a farmer’s market and gardening workshops. One Sunday, they staged a “burger opera” in which the opera-goers sat around eating hamburgers while roving tenors and sopranos serenaded them. On Turntable Nights, music-lovers are invited to pop by with their own records for DJs to spin.

“Often we consume culture by buying a ticket and sitting down for a show,” Glad said. “But there are more interactive ways to have fun.”

He said the best-used public spaces offer activities for many different kinds of people with a multitude of interests. A grassy lawn and a few park benches are not enough, he added. People will linger in a space only if there’s something to catch their fancy.

“We believe that somebody who comes to buy vegetables at the farmer’s market might then sit down to have a beer and then decide to stay for a show or sign up for a workshop on another day.”

Few people have spent more time in Les Jardins Gamelin than Agathe Moreau, the full-time gardener charged with planting and tending the new vegetable beds and leading tours and workshops. She has been watching the gardens bring together the most unlikely of workmates – university students, office workers, neighbours from the nearby Gay Village and homeless people.

“All kinds of people come by to talk and water and weed,” said Moreau, who works for Sentier Urbain, the urban agriculture group whose mission is to encourage city dwellers to grow their own food. “I want people to know that these gardens belong to everyone.”

Agathe Moreau tends to the vegetable gardens. They are “free-pick.”

To help make the point, she has made the gardens “free-pick,” which means that anyone can help himself or herself to whatever has come ripe. Just last week she and a team of volunteers filled 60 containers with kale for kale chips that became part of the day’s offering at the food-distribution site in the north end of the park.

While she’s staking tomato vines and picking elder flowers for cordial, Moreau says she has seen something really special start to take root.

The homeless people who were wary of the newcomers and their big plans when the park’s redevelopment began in April have begun to feel at home here. They make sure no one tramples the nasturtiums. Those who sleep on the park benches keep an eye out to make sure the gardens aren’t vandalized overnight when no one else is around.

“For a change, people who are so often seen as problematic get to be part of the solution,” Moreau said. “They tell me how good it feels to be in a place that’s green and beautiful.”

And there’s another thing, too. Morneau says she feels a lump in her throat when she sees street people and office workers and university students all sitting around in the same park enjoying the same music and the same space.

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